The Dangers of living… Part 2: Convalesce.

Last time I told of the horrible events that lead to my heart attack and the resulting ambulance ride to rescue.

I concluded that article with a note about how after putting the word out of my malady that my Twitter Friends conspired to blow up my phone with love and support and friendship.

What I didn’t say was that for the first six hours I was required to lay absolutely flat. I could twist my head left and right, but not pull my head up. I could move my arms as desired. This made bathroom tasks impossible to accomplish alone. Oh well, all the nurses that helped with that little part of living were kind and gentle.

While I was still getting the word out, someone from my company called and wanted to know something. They were not the supportive and caring indivuals that I dealt with the night before. After the second question I became a little tired of dealing with it and handed my phone to the nurse. Forgive me a giggle here, but she was professional, and a total sweetheart to me, but to them she turned into one hell of a Mother Bear Nurse Ratchet!

The Doctors came in to see me next. And when I say Doctors I mean plural. There was four of them, and they were about the best sawbones I could have hoped to have overseeing my recovery. They promised to check on me later. The charge nurse returned and asked if I felt eating lunch to which I said I didn’t feel up to it in the posture I was currently in.

More phone calls to family, once again I summoned the charge nurse to help out with relaying information when my limited endurance to handle such things wore thin. Lots of questions and answers and boredom. Oh how wonderful it was to have my Twitter Friends interrupting that boredom at random intervals. One pair of my close Twitter Friends (and you know you are) even tried calling the hospital. Sadly, the Hospital did what they were supposed to do and didn’t release any information.

3pm came and it was time for the 9 inch spike to come out. I had every intention of snapping a photo of it for later posterity, but the nurse kept her back to me, preventing me even a glimpse of its removal. She did offer me a moment to look, but in the moment, the opportunity to take a photo escaped me. Part of the procedure left me sore and bruised. The nurse had to hold hard pressure on the spot where the spike was driven in, for twenty minutes by the clock. While mauling my tender crotch, the nurse was warning me about the area’s importance to my blood stream and that I needed to let them know at once if there was any bleeding from the site.

As my mind is want to do, it cast back into memories then. I silently wondered if I yelled ‘Nurse Quickfoot, I’m bleeding’ into the intercom (not that I needed it, being adjacent to the nurses station) if the reaction would have been memorable in its swiftness. Thankfully the need to put this trivia to the test did not occur.

So far, the weather I could see outside my window was dreary and bleak. I could see the coal trains passing below. Hear the med-flight chopper come and go. Even hear ‘heart alerts’ coming on the PA and knew that they were getting all the same attention I had that morning.

In truth, my Mother was blindsided by my call that Saturday morning. She put the word out to the family and started trying to find a way to get to Virginia in a hurry. Delta bent over backwards to help out, but it wasn’t possible for her to get a flight out Saturday night but had a standby reservation for Sunday.

At 6 pm, I was permitted to sit up to a bed level of 30 degrees. It wasn’t long after this that I was able to eat the first meal I’d had in almost 24 hours. Night had fallen outside my window and there wasn’t much happening. I didn’t get up until later that night after the Doctors came by on their evening rounds. The first thing I did was pull out the drawstring shorts I keep in my shower bag and put them on. Then I grabbed my iPad and played games to distract me until about 11pm when I put everything down and fell asleep.

Sunday morning began much like the day before, though the breakfast tray was the stimulation. I ate most of what they offered me, but didn’t care for much of it. The coffee was decaf, the milk was skim, and the ‘western omlette’ was… Perhaps I better not dwell on that. Called Mom, and she gave me the bad news that she had lost her standby seat because of something else that was going on at the time.

That weekend, a terrible winter storm system was causing all of the airlines much grief all over the United States. But where that goes, I’ll save for the next installment.

An avid photographer and writer constantly on some quest about this vast continent. In search of damsels-causing-distress, dragons-to-rescue (from the damsels), and legendary on-time service! In all seriousness I am a long haul truck driver that enjoys photoblogging his finds in our world and who has a tendency to wax poetic.